On Mon, 15 Jan 1996, Alan Horowitz wrote:
Well, who is a non-native? If it walked across the Bering Sea land bridge a few thousand years ago, does it have a higher moral value than if it hopped a ride on the bilges of a cargo ship in 1957?
Morality has nothing to do with it. It's the speed of the evolution. If you walk across the straits, the system has the time to react and restore a dynamic equilibrium. If you immediately release a new species with no natural predators, the system is shattered, and it might not survive. This is not to say that ecosystems and societies are static -- they evolve constantly, displaying unpredictable punctuated equilibrium (Steven J. Gould was right, Edmund Burke and Karl Marx were wrong). Usually, the mutations (in biology or politics) are minor, and almost always, they are localized. Large-scale catastrophes like a meteor hitting the earth and killing all the dinosours (or whatever happened), or nuclear war, or whatever, are larger punctuation than normal. Sometimes the ecosystem recovers, sometimes a completely new ecosystem forms, sometimes all life but the cockroaches is wiped out. Politically and morally, I'm a follower of the realist school (Morgenthau et al). It is right for the US to dominate the world because it has the most power. On the level of international relations, it doesn't matter how it got that way; trying to reverse the power realities would be like trying to dam the Pacific Ocean. Of course, in specific cases in the present, we can make moral choices, and if we feel like it, we can help out the present victims of historical "immorality" (like the fact that the descendants of slaves weren't born into the same inheritance as the descendants of the Carnegies and Vanderbilts).
If you want to isolate the rainforest until mankind has had time to completely inventory all the species and test them to see if they are the next cure for malaria or an exploitable raw material, well, now you have my sympathy.
Sympathy is the wrong emotion for both politics and science, but then, what you're talking about isn't sympathy. Cute cuddly seals and frieldly dolphins and teddy bears get "sympathy" among mainstrean "environmentalists," and the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Federation calendars raise a lot of money, but it's the plants and bugs and bacteria that are really important. Elephants and blue whales look big and important to us, but they're really inconsequential in the larger scheme of biodiversity. They could go extinct and the planet doesn't really care. But kill the blue-green algae and the trees, and we're all dead. -rich